


This Side of Nothing

by halfpenny



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-11
Updated: 2006-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfpenny/pseuds/halfpenny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time she thinks about killing Ben, she almost throws up. </p>
<p>(the very first fic I ever wrote)</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Side of Nothing

 

 

“Or if our substance be indeed divine,

And cannot cease to be, we are at worst

On this side of nothing.”

- _Paradise Lost_ , Book II

 

She is a better docotr than he thinks she is. Frankly, she finds it insulting that Jack believes fertility specialists have no knowledge of basic human anatomy. She slogged through med school with the rest of her class, surviving on caffeine and cigarettes somoked in the supply closet, and passed, exhausted, and wishing she had listened to her mother and become an accountant.

While Jack rants into the walkie, she leans over the table and peers into Ben. The cut is bleeding heavily and the edges of the incision pulse with his heartbeat, but it is small and clean. It would take seven, maybe eight stitches to suture. A needle, thread, and two minutes are all she needs to close him by herself. The tumor is gone, scraped off the shock-white bones of Ben’s vertebrae by the meticulous doctor, and deposited in a Biohazard bag. All she needs to do to save her husband’s life is pick up that needle. That’s it. She can hear the voice of her chief resident in the static from the walkie. _Alright, Juliet. Now close him up._ She reaches for the clamp.

***

The doctor is standing on the table when she pushes open the heavy door. He wrenches at the chains dangling from the ceiling as if they would move, as if he could move them if he just jerks hard enough. She know they won’t budge (they’ve held things like him before), but the violence of the dark links against his arms, the cold cut of metal into skin, tugs at something from the back of her mind. When Jack first sees her, his eyes sweep over her without alarm or desire. The skin on the tops of her arms prickle, a flash of uncomfortable heat.

“Stop that.”

***

Juliet had gone out drinking with her friends that night before the mid-morning commencement ceremony, and her head throbbed as the Dean droned out names of unknown classmates. Before long, she was squinting through bloodshot eyes as a stocky administrative assistant pumped her hand with ungodly enthusiasm and shoved a medical degree into her stomach. Grasping her future in one hand, she shuffled off the platform and took a quick exit out of the stuffy auditorium. Juliet stripped off the graduation gown and smoothed her wrinkled sundress.

The campus was blessedly deserted and the trees spotting the main quad had their spring leaves out. Patches of shade and sunlight dappled the lawn. The sun was bright and cheery, and felt unusually warm for this time of day. It burned like hell through Juliet’s haze. She found a sturdy-looking oak and slid down its trunk, bumping to a rest on the hard-packed dirt. The bark was rough and poked her bare shoulders. Her long hair caught on a whorl and snarled into a tiny knot as she rolled her neck. The three of her five cervical vertebrae popped, discharging pent-up gas from the space between the discs. Juliet smiled at the muted crunch of release and leaned back. She lifted her chin until her face found a bit of warmth. A world of red settled behind her eyelids.

“Congratulations.” Juliet cracked one eye. A funny-looking man was standing over her, his shadow falling over her drawn-up knees.

“Excuse me?”

“On your graduation.” The man nodded at her diploma, and Juliet felt foolish. “It’s quite an achievement.” There was something odd about his voice. Something formal. Juliet sat up straight and smiled her please-go-away-now smile.

“Thank you.”

“What’s your area of specialty, if I might --?”

“Oh, fertility counseling.”

His eyes were pale and wide, and his hair was beginning to thin around his forehead. Juliet wondered how old he was. He gestured to the ground next to her.

“May I?”

To this day, she doesn’t know why, but she said “Yes, of course. Do sit down.” She hadn’t ever used that combination of words before, but it all seemed so natural. He sat back against the tree a respectable distance from her and breathed deeply in and then out. Juliet shook her head and smiled again. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Juliet.” The funny-looking man’s name was Ben.

Four months later, they were married.

***

After it was all over, Tom had escorted Jack back to the tank. He is still wearing his scrubs when Juliet comes in. She notes his hand is swelling from the scuffle with Jeffery and he has a spot of blood shaped like an apple on the edge of the Dharma-issue garment. His own blood. He lifts that dark gaze to hers, all reproach and disappointment. He squeezes the back of his neck, a movement of self-comfort. Juliet doesn’t like that she’s begun to recognize the small language of his body.

He speaks first, grasping at the fading control of the operating room. “How is he?”  
“You did well, Jack. Not quite what we’d had in mind, but –”

“How is he?”  
“Kate is safe, by the way. Sawyer too. We’ve moved them back to your camp. You can speak to – ”

“How is Ben, Juliet?” She stops. He has never used her name like that before, desperate and hard. She’s never seen him like this either, not even when he wept for his wife half a world away who didn’t love him back anymore. He is stripped. Raw. Down to doctor and patient, time and space forgotten and forgone, leaving only this. Juliet doesn’t like it. She prefers his anger, so she holds his gaze.

“Ask me no questions.” Everything in Jack tightens. Here is comes, she thinks, that beautiful purple-red blossom of rage, a shaking glorious wash of wrath bubbled up from the depths of the good doctor. Juliet is so busy admiring it, she doesn’t anticipate Jack’s movement, and is taken utterly by surprise when he grabs her by the throat.

***

She doesn’t know what Ben’s first lie was, but she certainly remembers his last. They were in bed, Ben’s glasses perched on his nose as he paged through _Paradise Lost_. Juliet preferred a little horror in her light reading and bullied Ben through _Pet Sematary_ the week before. “To cleanse my literary palate,” he says when she eyes the Milton, and kisses her when she pouts.

That night, while Ben mutters the Devil’s speeches to himself, Juliet curls into her pillow and waits for her new husband to flip off the light. He does, and presses up behind her, plants a kiss on the back of her neck. Later, Juliet will think of that as the last real time she is happy with Ben.

She will think about it on the island as she lies sweating in the thick night air, think about his small, dry mouth against her skin. She will press the heels of her palms onto her thighs and wish to go back. A system’s restore point. She will think about what she’d do if she managed to throw herself back through sheer force of will. She’d roll over, kiss Ben, and wait until his breathing slowed and evened. She’d slip out of bed, pass her slippers on the floor, and walk barefoot out the front door. She’d find a bus or a train or a car. She varies the vehicle sometime, but what happens next remains constant. She’d get in that car and drive until the sun came up and went down again. Drive far away from words like Hanso Foundation and Dharma Initiative and South Pacific Ocean.

He said it was only a trial run. He said it was for a few months. He said the island was like the Garden before the Fall.

Juliet said it sounded neat.

She gets in that car most nights in her mind.

***

The others in the program are considerate neighbors, Juliet must give them that much. It seems almost too easy to pack all her summer clothes into boxes and fly twenty-two hours straight to this little paradox of a sandbox. The lemon-colored paneling and whitewashed garden sheds put her in mind of the Fifties’ suburban ideal. For the first few weeks, Juliet finds herself suppressing giggles at the absurdity of it all, the perfect ring of houses on a deserted tropical island. But the weeks turn into months, and months into a year, and Juliet stops laughing.

When Ben tells her he’d been born here, that he grew up three doors down from their house, that they weren’t leaving, Juliet runs. She runs through the jungle, every branch across her face is a reproval. Stupid. Trapped. Liar. Out. Out. Out. She doesn’t stop until she feels sand under her feet. She collapses before she hits the water, face down into the sand. She spends God knew how long sucking in great lung-fulls of air before something poked her between her shoulders. Hard. She rolls over to squint up at Colleen’s husband. Pucket or Pickett, she can’t remember.

“Pussy,” he says. “When Cole told me, I got a hundred yards out to sea before they caught up.” He walks off the beach, but Juliet stays and stares out at the water. Part of her is curious just what she would have done if she’d made the water, but the rest of her doesn’t really want to know.

***

Amelia likes to say, look around, can’t you see we’re living in the middle of paradise? But Juliet can’t see paradise. All she can see is the shoreline.

***

She doesn’t remember when Jack became the island, but now she can’t recall how she could ever tell them apart. Even now as his hands tighten around her throat, the veins cording on his arms, on his neck are vines tracing up to the sand stubble along his jaw. Spots of verdant green sail across her eyes and his breath on her cheek smells like salt and decay. She mouths his name, or tries to anyway, as he vision tunnels.

Jack drops her and she falls. He slides to the floor beside her, his back against the wall like a good prisoner while Juliet chokes on air in heap. It takes several minutes to get her breath back and Juliet knows that when she wakes tomorrow (although it was close for a heartbeat or two), she’ll have a necklace of bruises around her neck. When she manages to look up, Jack has not moved. His head is bowed and his surgeon’s hands hang limp beside him. Juliet crawls to him until she can feel his shallow breaths on her face. She keeps one hand on her throat when she leans forward.

“Jack?” Nothing. She might as well be alone in this room, and maybe she is. “Jack?” His head stays down, even when she ducks under his chin and kisses him.

***

Amelia calls Pickett and Juliet transplants, cuttings of thick-blooded plants from the mainland put in pots and brought to the island. After Dharma fell (which for the life of her, Juliet can’t get Ben to talk about), it became necessary to introduce fresh genes into the island’s pool. Especially after the original Dharma women stopped conceiving. The sound of Ben’s voice tinged with spring sunlight asking her specialty keeps Juliet up at night. While Ben is off paroling the coast of the island in that tin can passing for a submarine or in the Hydra doing whatever it was he did down there, Juliet listens to music. Any and every album in the house, she doesn’t care what. But after she and Ben celebrate their third anniversary with a pecan pie and soft, leisurely fuck, she starts playing songs with the word “city” in them more often.

The first time she thinks about killing Ben, she almost throws up. He is asleep next to her with his mouth open, wheezing as he twitches in the throes of an unknown dream. She stumbles into the bathroom and kneels in front of the toilet. She dry heaves several times, but nothing comes. She sleeps on the floor next to the bed, and in the morning when Ben asks what happened, she replies she must have rolled over in the night and not woken.

***

Jack must have his eyes closed because he jolts like he’s gripped an electrical wire when Juliet puts her mouth on his. It is awful. It is a disaster. It is the fucking fall of Troy and Juliet thinks this might be the worst thing she’s ever done and she honestly believes she’ll die, she’ll just die if Jack won’t kiss her back.

He struggles against her, pushing at her shoulders, but Juliet isn’t having that. Jack opens his mouth, to speak or shout she doesn’t know, but his mouth is open now and Juliet takes what she can get. She draws his lower lip into her mouth and bites down until a whisper of copper floats across her tongue. Jack freezes with his palms still flexed, braced against Juliet. She feels him tremble once, twice, and then his arms are around her and his mouth slants over hers and Juliet is back in the jungle, branches tearing at her face, her hair, under her shirt, and oh, God, those hands. They’re pulling down her bra and pushing her back onto the floor.

Juliet hooks her leg over Jack’s back and presses her hips up to meet his. He feels like stone against her thigh and suddenly it is more important than breathing that she feels his skin on hers. She fumbles for the snap of his jeans under the scrubs, but Jack beats her to the punch. He leaves her mouth to strip the pale pink button-down from her, his breathing heavy and damp on her face, like a broken promise come to call. Her arms bend back with the sleeves of the shirt and before she can reach for Jack, he grips her wrists hard with one hand. He attacks her neck, using teeth and tongue to make Juliet shudder. She gasps, “Oh, my holy God.”

Jack fists his free hand in her loose hair. “Don’t say a fucking word.” Juliet wonders if this is how Jack was with Sarah (or Kate, she doesn’t know and that bothers her more than she’d care to admit), then Jack shoves his hand down the front of Juliet’s sensible khaki pants and she stops thinking altogether. He’s moving too fast and he’s pressing too hard, but her body doesn’t seem to mind because heat is building low in her belly and she thinks if she can just get Jack to slow down and crook his finger again, then she could finish this and sleep tonight without the bright blue water of that goddamned beach waiting behind her eyes. She shouts when she comes, more from surprise than pleasure, because it hurts just a little more than it should and she ought to care but doesn’t.

Jack has his jeans off before the aftershocks have stopped.

***

Juliet is shocked at how cold the clamp is in her hand. She had not idea the room had gotten so hot so quickly. Her resident beeps in time with the heart rate monitor. He lectures about increased risks of infection that accompany elevated temperatures in OR’s, but his voice is fading into the red mist rising in her mind. Instead she hears the squeak of a black permanent marker against cardboard cue cards waiting to be held up in front of a camera. Ben was in the Hydra, getting ready to bury Cole when she crossed the final T. _It has to look like an accident._ It’s the only way, Juliet told herself and capped the marker. The heady, chemical smell of it followed her for hours after.

It’s been forty-five minutes now since Jack made the cut. Jack is four or five paces from her. She grips the clamp and backs away from the table. Jack is sweating and twitching, waiting for any sound from the radio. He jerks at every burst of white noise. But he has nothing to worry about. Once the patrols find Sawyer and Kate, they’ll be returned to their island. After they are safely back, Juliet will activate a distress beacon that’s been kept under lock and key for over thirty years. It’s the only one on either island powerful enough to reach the shipping lanes. Juliet estimates it will take a day, maybe two for a ship to respond. The key to the beacon is in Ben’s front pocket. It has been since the day Juliet met him under that oak tree. He always keeps it on his person, even around his neck when he sleeps.

_It has to look like an accident._ Tom is sitting on the floor behind the table with his head in his hands. He can’t see a thing. Juliet dangles the clamp at her side and strides over to Jack. “Jack, be reasonable. Ben can’t hold out much longer.”

Jack’s smile is almost feral. “I know, so you’d better hope—”

“Jack,” she says and waits for him to pivot away from her. She brings the metal down hard across the back of his head. It takes two hits to send Jack to the floor. The thump sends Tom to his feet.

“Juliet, what—”

“I don’t—he came at me—I thought he was going to—” She’s shaking. That much, at least, is real. Tom, ever the caretaker, slides a comforting hand over her back. He’s a good man and he doesn’t deserve this. “Please, Tom. Try to find help. Anyone, just…please, Tom” Tom lumbers out the swinging door. Panic could do wondrous things for speed, but his knees have been arthritic for the last fifteen years and he isn’t going anywhere fast. Almost all the patrols are out hunting down the escapees and one is taking Alex back to a holding camp. Poor Alex. She of all people would take this the worst. When the line was drawn, she might choose to stay here. Juliet will of course give everyone the option when the time comes. It was more than she was given.

The room is quiet now, except for the computerized beat of Ben’s heart and Jack’s shallow breathing. Juliet pulls a chair from the corner of the room up to the table where her husband lies dying. She knows she should say something, anything really, explain herself, ask forgiveness, crow her vengeance, but nothing comes to mind, so she is silent.

Thirty-two minutes later, when Tom returns with Pickett, Jack is beginning to stir on the floor and Juliet is still sitting in that chair, listening to the flat tone of the heart rate monitor.

***

Juliet does up the remaining buttons on her shirt. There aren’t many. Jack has already pulled his jeans up, but hasn’t zipped them shut. He is against the wall, like he was when this all started. When Juliet brushes a piece of her hair away from her face (it’s still flushed and she wishes that would go away before she has to leave), she pauses. It’s foolish to ask and she doesn’t want to know, so she won’t, she won’t, but sure as sin, she hears her own voice asking, “Was Ben telling the truth?”

“About what?”

Juliet clears her throat. “Do I look like her?”

Now Jack moves. He pushes up from the wall and Juliet feels her heart kick up. He walks around her, obscenely close, but never touching. Juliet doesn’t breathe until he’s standing in front of her again. He leans toward her and she damns herself for swaying forward. “No,” he says. “You don’t look a thing like her.” Juliet leaves Jack alone in the room with his pants undone. She does not look back.

***

Ben enjoys reading out loud sometimes. She likes his voice, so she doesn’t mind. He’s been on an English poetry kick lately. Juliet gives it another week before he switches to Russian short stories or non-fiction essays or something equally intellectual. He’s reading _Paradise Lost_ to her from the kitchen table and she’s emptying the dishwasher, not really listening. They’ve only been dating for a few weeks, but Juliet’s already thinking about asking him to move in. Suddenly, she calls over her shoulder. “Could you read that again? I didn’t catch that.” Ben’s voice floats over to her, warm and safe and soft.

“ ‘For long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.’ ”

***

Years later, Juliet will be lying next to a different man, in a different bed with a different last name. She’ll try to think of the island, something specific like the trees or the color of the Dharma houses or the scent of the ocean, but all she will be able to remember is Jack’s face. And that will be enough.

 

 

 


End file.
